New luxury apartment buildings blow up the Austin housing market

New luxury apartment buildings blow up the Austin housing market

Austin is one of the hottest rental markets in the U.S., so it's not much of a surprise to learn that we like our apartments fancy. How fancy? Of all the apartment projects completed in 2015, 92 percent of them were high-end.

Catering to renters with deeper pockets seems to be a trend here. Rents in Austin aren't cheap, and now RentCafe has confirmed that many Texas cities seem destined for more luxury living.

Using data from Yardi Matrix, RentCafe sifted through all the large-scale, multi-family properties built last year to find the high-end or luxury ones.

In San Antonio, 100 percent of all new apartments that went up last year were high-end. That's right, 100 percent. In Dallas, the number is 93 percent, 1 percent ahead of Austin. Eighty-nine percent of Houston's new apartments were high-end, and Fort Worth slides in with 86 percent.

Nationally, the trend is at 75 percent, with the Southwest (hello) and Mid-Atlantic regions leading in luxury construction at 88 percent.

A handful of cities experienced "spectacular" growth in the luxury apartment area, including Midland-Odessa and its 800 percent increase. In 2012, there was just one high-end rental complex. As of 2015, there were nine.

RentCafe points out the Texas domination, noting that "urban Houston, Dallas, San Antonio, Austin, Midland, Fort Worth, and Spring saw a combined total of 103 new luxury rental properties in 2015 and only six non-luxury rental properties."

These well-off renters-by-choice are proving their demand, as RentCafe found that the average occupancy rate in high-end rental properties was 95.8 percent as of the end of 2015.